Why Does America Like Me?

Ive been to the States a few times. I had a great visit to Atlanta once, and an unforgettable holiday driving around the South West, starting and ending in the Rockies, oh and I gave a paper at a conference at Stanford Uni one time and stayed a few days in Palo Alto and that was terrific. So I've got some fond memories of beautiful places and lovely people.

That's why it makes me a tiny bit guilty sometimes that here in this blog, (and the other one) I tend to be rather critical of the place. It's why I've been pretty quiet this time around about the Republican primaries (although, I have to say, that guy Santorum is a certifiable nutjob - and the War on Women makes me shudder - but let's not go there). It's hard to listen to the GOP's insane rantings without wanting to lay into them with a syringe full of antipsychotics, or an axe. I thought G W Bush was bad, but this year's crop is just scary.

So, as an antidote, I'd really just like to say thank you to the good people of America for all the support they've given me over the past few years. Consistently, I find that five times as many Americans than, say, Australians or Brits, read my blogs - even though I come from the UK and now live in Oz. Better still, ten times as many Americans have bought my novel, TimeSplash, than Brits, (and ten times more Brits have bought it than Aussies)! That is just amazingly kind of you all.

So, to the thousands and thousands of Americans who have been helping me out over the past few years: Thank You. You guys are great. Sorry about all the carping. And I hope you get your economy fixed soon, and you don't get saddled with too big a loony at the next general election, and you finally sort out that church and state thing you've been having so much trouble with.

Asset-Stripping

What kind of rubbish is this? An online newspaper I read just published an article about an article in a print newspaper called The Australian. Since when was quoting another news outlet's opinions considered news?

The piece in The Australian - a newspaper famous here for being a mouthpiece of the Rupert Murdoch view of life and a front-runner in his stable's race to the bottom -  was about how low the planned Chinese carbon tax would be and how high the Australian one is and how "out of step" with the world our carbon tax is.

And what a surprise, a Murdoch-owned newspaper doesn't like Australia's carbon tax. Big deal. Murdoch and his cronies in the mining, coal and oil industries can spout off all they like, his opinions are hardly news any more and I'm sick of hearing them over and over from all the newspapers and TV and radio stations he owns.

The fact is, China's move to a carbon tax (however low they've started) is the most important and significant event since the Kyoto treaty was signed. It's a major triumph and I'm sure Australia's dramatic recent move had an influence. The whingers at the Australian should remember that China has already made big steps towards becoming a 21st Century, clean economy. This is another one.

If the West wants to keep up, we need to force our old industries to change - and fast. They won't do it themselves. These old, polluting dinosaurs will drag Australia down to Third World status if we let them. And when they've asset-stripped Australia, they'll move on to their next victim.

Yasmin needs brain surgery but can't afford it

It is a sad and terrible indictment of the society in which we live that a woman like Yasmin McKillop might die because she can't afford the surgery that could save her life. Yasmin is a young woman, a nurse who cares for old people at my local hospital. She's one of those lovely people you take to immediately. She is married to my friend James, who is blind, and they have two young boys. And now, Yasmin has a brain tumour. The prognosis from surgeons at the public hospitals here is very poor, but there is a surgeon in Sydney who believes he can save her, if she can find sixty thousand dollars for the operation.

On a nurse's wage and James' invalidity benefits, Yasmin has no house to sell, no savings to draw on. Her family are just ordinary, working people. That kind of money is so far beyond the reach of normal people that it must seem completely hopeless to her family and friends.

In desperation, her sister, Mia, has launched an appeal. Mia is not a media-savvy campaigner with far-reaching networks into the circles where money like this is easily found. She's just a young woman who lives and works in a small, country town who loves her sister and is doing all she can for her. She has put up a Facebook page. She is talking to local people and local businesses - in Stanthorpe, one of the poorest towns in the whole of Australia. That's why we need to do something to help Mia raise that money and save her sister.

I know most of the people who read my blog are writers and working people too. I doubt we could raise that much money between us, but we can raise some, and there are plenty of other ways we can help. This is what I would like each of you to do.

1. Visit Mia's Facebook page and donate something to the appeal - even if it is only $5 - the price of a cup of coffee. The link is also at the bottom of this post.

2. Use the Facebook and Tweet this links at the top of this post to spread the word to your social networks. You can also Digg the post, or use StumbleUpon or any other sharing tools you like. Do whatever you can to help Mia get the message out to the world that Yasmin needs help.

3. Mention the appeal on Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, MySpace, Twitter, and anywhere else you have an audience.

4. Write a blog post on your own blog - even if it is just one sentence with a link to Mia's appeal page, it might just help.

5. If you know a journalist, mention Yasmin's plight to them. A 'human interest' story like this might just be something they, or a colleague, are looking for. If the story made it into a State or national newspaper, or was mentioned on a popular radio or TV show, it would take the appeal to a level where anything is possible. Even if you don't live in Australia, mention it anyway. Generosity doesn't stop at national borders.

6. Write a letter and send it to your local newspaper, your local radio station, your local Rotary Club, anywhere you can think of where people might be willing to help.

I'm sorry to ask. I'm sorry to live in a society where I have to ask. Please help Yasmin and her family. Please do whatever you can.

The link to the appeal is http://www.facebook.com/Yasmin.Aid?sk=info

Graham Storrs to Sign With The Book Harvest Literary Agency

Remember what  my 2010 end of year report said was the one thing 2011 would be all about? Or when I tried to find a single word to describe my hopes for 2011?

Yes, this was going to be the year that I got myself a literary agent, someone who would represent my work to the big-league publishers, someone who would promote me in circles I simply cannot reach, someone who would talke my writing career to a new professional level. Well, just two months into the year, I have found that agent. We haven't quite signed the contract yet, but I am very, very pleased to let you know that brand new, Sydney-based literary agency The Book Harvest has agreed to represent me, particularly, that Ineke Prochazka, is my go-to guy at the agency.

You might think that signing with an agency that hasn't made a single sale yet is a bit of a risk. You may also remember that I recently turned down an offer from another agent because I didn't think they could do enough for me, even though they did have an actual track record of sales. Well, yes, of course it's a risk, but Book Harvest has two very important things going for it.

The first is that the agency is positioning itself at the top of the food chain, aiming to sell to the big-name publishers. Events may prove that they couldn't make it, but their ambitions and mine line up nicely and the idea of being paired with a new agency has always appealed to me. We're both hungry for this and we're both going to go flat out to make it happen.

The second is Ineke Prochazka herself. She comes highly recommended by someone whose judgement I trust, she's got a background in the retail side of the book business (the side of the business, in my view, that it is absolutely vital to be across these days), and, in my dealings with her so far, she seems like a nice and approachable person, someone I'll be happy to do business with.

Of course, that contract isn't signed yet and there's many a slip, etc., but I am very pleased with how this is going so far and hope to get the paperwork out of the way very soon.

Wish me luck!

One Word #reverb10

December 1 One Word.

Encapsulate the year 2010 in one word. Explain why you’re choosing that word. Now, imagine it’s one year from today, what would you like the word to be that captures 2011 for you?
(Author: Gwen Bell)

2010 – Publisher

2010 was the year I achieved a lifelong ambition and had my first novel published. TimeSplash - a rollicking sci-fi romp set in the near future - was by no means the first novel I'd ever written. More like the tenth! But it was the first to make it into print. My publisher (oh how sweet those words are!) Lyrical Press, brought the book out in a range of ebook editions in February this year. It was a moment of triumph, of course, but also a moment of relief. You know what it's like when you tick off these huge milestones in your life. You did it. You made it. For evermore, your achievement will stand. No-one can take it away.

In recent weeks, I've signed with a second publisher (the very exciting, Big Bad Media) to produce an audiobook of TimeSplash (read by the fabulous Emma Newman no less!) and, probably, in a yet-to-be-finalised bit of company pair-bonding, to bring the book out in print with eMergent Publishing (an honest-to-God Aussie publisher no less!)

What a year! Definitely one to remember. I learned a lot and got to know some great people.

2011 – Agent

If you've been reading my writing blog, you'll know that I've been trying to find an agent for some weeks now. I actually found one last week and, after an epiphany, or psychotic episode (the way it felt, it could have been either) I turned them down, hoping to find a better agent.

You see, the agent I want is one that can take my career to stratospheric levels. Don't get me wrong, the publishers I'm working with now are terrific. The energy and enthusiasm is outstanding and I'm sure we're going to do great things together. It's just that, in the long run, I'd like to crank this all up a great many notches. Maybe BBM and eMergent are the people I will do that with. And that would be truly outstanding! But I'm no spring chicken (except in my general demeanour and level of maturity) and if I want to get on that NYT best-seller list, I need to get my arse in gear and start doing what it takes.

So the agent thing is my Plan B strategy for getting there. Because, sadly, to get on that list, it helps enormously to have been published by a top-of-the-heap publisher, and, equally sadly, the only way to get your manuscripts in front of such publishers is through an agent - and a good one at that. And that means reseraching and querying. Success at finding an agent in 2011 is my target then. Watch this space.


Thanks to Merrilee for pointing me to this project.

A Post on Behalf of Electronic Frontiers Australia

I received this email from EFA and I reproduce it here in full, in case anyone out there would also like to help in the campaign against Internet censorship in Australia.

Electronic Frontiers Australia needs your support to protect online
civil liberties in this country!

Over the past few months, EFA has been working hard campaigning for an
Open Internet against Government censorship of the Internet
(http://openinternet.com.au/). While we are proud of what we have
achieved in that campaign, the Government's decision to delay the
introduction of the legislation means that it will be prolonged and
ongoing campaign. Moreover, that is only one example of EFA's
activities and interests (http://www.efa.org.au/projects/). In
addition to Internet censorship, EFA also campaigns on a wide range of
issues relating to Internet regulation, including copyright,
defamation, R18+ for computer games, telecommunications, ISP
liability, privacy, domain names, trade marks, and the digital
economy.

Most of this campaign work is carried out by elected Board Members,
who act in a voluntary capacity and are not remunerated for their time
spent on EFA projects. This will not change. However, if EFA is to
continue to expand and launch further campaigns, we need money for
media, organisation and lobbying.

That is why, starting today, we are launching a fundraising drive so
that we have the necessary funds to effectively protect online civil
liberties in this country.

Visit http://www.efa.org.au/support2010/ and learn more about what it
is that EFA does and what your money will be spent on, and then please
give whatever you can afford. The recent debate in this country
around Internet censorship demonstrates that we cannot take our civil
liberties for granted and that EFA is in the best position to campaign
on your behalf.

In addition to donating, please forward this email to your family and
friends, and encourage them to support EFA.

You can also show your support by participating in the Open Internet
campaign (http://openinternet.com.au/) and by becoming a fan of EFA on
Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/pages/EFA-Electronic-Frontiers-Australia/36777331283?v=wall).
You can also now buy EFA merchandise on Zazzle
(http://www.zazzle.com.au/efa_oz).

Thank you for your support.

Electronic Frontiers Australia

Saints Alive!

You know what? You don't cure cancer with magic. You cure it with medical procedures. You take thousands of scientists, thousands of doctors, and they work on the problen night and day for decades and decades. They train for the best part of a decade, they devote their lives to chipping away at this monstrous problem, they spend their whole careers doing it, just so they can pass a few, precious scraps of new knowledge down to the next generation of scientists and doctors.

And, after decades of intense, worldwide recearch, the results start to come. When I was a child, cancer was a death sentence. If you had it, you asked, "How long have I got?" These days, the rate of curing cancer is about 50%. If you get it you ask, "Can it be fixed?" It's one of the triumphs of our age that we have come so far in fighting this hideous disease.

So it really pisses me off that the Catholic church, has canonised an Asutralian woman because she cured cancer by a miracle. A miracle! Those fat cat bishops, controlling vast fortunes, running an organisation that has only last week scandalised us all by its sexual abuse of small children in Germany, have said that this woman cured cancer by magic!

Magic!

Well, I'm sorry. You don't cure cancer by magic. You cure it by applying brilliant minds and inconceivable amounts of hard work and resources for year after year after year. That's how you do it. You don't cure cancer by magic! And it's an insult to all those men and women who have worked so hard all their lives to even suggest that you do.

If the Catholic bishops really want to do something about cancer, they should give up their silly mumbo-jumbo canonisation rituals, stop talking crap about magic cures, sell some of their staggeringly huge assets, and invest the money in cancer research. That might actually help someone.

TimeSplash Twitter Tour Starts Now!

The TimeSplash Non-Stop 24-hour Round-the-World Twitter Tour starts soon. The process is complicated but all you need to know is that I'll be in your timezone between 7pm and 8pm during the next 24 hours. To shout out to me as I go by, send me a tweet on Twitter.

This is my Twitter ID: @graywave ( http://twitter.com/graywave )

I'll be using the hashtag #timesplash if you'd like to follow the whole thing (and have lots of stamina and a very high tolerance for me saying "Hello New York", "Hola Argentina" "Gruetzi Switzerland" and such for the next 24 hours.)

Don't forget to shout. And if you know people in odd places, tell them to shout out too. I've a feeling some parts of this are going to be very lonely :-}

The Price of Christmas

I see that a priest in York, England has recommended that his parishioners steal the things they need this Christmas since no-one else is going to help them out. Is conspiracy to commit a mortal sin a sin too? The theology could get tricky. However, the humanity is plain and simple. The plight of the homeless in the UK - while not nearly so bas as that of the homeless in the USA - is heart-wrenching. No decent person can witness it without revolting against the system that creates and sustains it.

And that system is capitalism.

Christmas may be a good time to remember that there is no such thing as a free lunch. The food heaped on our plates, the mostly-unwanted gifts, the treats and indulgences, the lights and the shiny, plastic baubles, all have to be paid for.

In a capitalist society, the payment is made by the consumer - you and me - from money we get by selling our labour to the people who control the capital. They get their money by selling the product of our labour back to us in the form of meals, plastic baubles and so on. The magic of capitalism is that, by this process, capital increases. Somehow value is added by the act of production. Where does it come from?

It comes from various kinds of exploitation, but two in particular: the exploitation of workers, and the exploitation of the environment. Workers are exploited by not paying them anything like the value of their product would suggest they should be paid. The excess goes to the owners of the capital. These days, when workers in the consuming countries ask to be paid more fairly, their jobs, and the exploitation, are moved overseas to places where workers are paid even less and can be more thoroughly exploited. That this leaves people with no source of income because they have lost the ability to sell their labour, might be seen as a bad thing, but for capitalism it is good, it means that labour becomes a plentiful commodity that can now be bought more cheaply. (This is also one of the reasons why capitalists like population growth.) It means that the workers who were once in danger of earning enough that they were no longer so badly exploited, but who lost their jobs, are now forced get new jobs at lower wages and be properly exploited again. To keep capital growing, exploitation of workers has to be increasingly efficient and widespread. It is called 'productivity'.

Even so, you can only take the exploitation of workers so far before the rate of increase declines. For capital to keep on growing you have to keep pumping new wealth into the system. That's where the environment comes in. Along with people's work, the environment is the source of all wealth. Fuels and materials dug from the ground, animals and plants taken or farmed in the seas and on the land, are the raw feedstock of capitalism. To keep capital growing, the people with access to these resources, must keep acquiring them in ever-larger amounts. The consumption of raw materials by our 'primary industries' is nothing less than the consumption of our planet. With increasing speed, capitalism is taking whatever is usable from the world, using it to fuel growth, and dumping the rest as polluting slag - on the land, in the seas, and in the air. What's more, like the exploitation of workers, the exploitation of the environment must also be driven to ever-greater efficiency.

It is clear to everyone who thinks about these things, that capitalism cannot survive forever - or even for very much longer - without finding more things to exploit. The 'global market' has now, pretty much included every possible worker on the planet in capitalism's web of exploitation. There is plenty of of opportunity for growth there still, but the resource - us - is finite. The environment is starting to show signs of breaking down under the strain. Global warming, peak oil, extinctions of fish stocks, and global food shortages, are all signs that we are using up what is there at an unsustainable rate.

Technology has always been capitalism's friend. The need for more efficient exploitation has always driven technological development. The people who control capital - and the people who depend on its products - are in a precarious position just now. It looks as if the environment might collapse, or run out of key materials, before technological fixes have been found for these problems. We need new places to exploit - the asteroids? other planets? - before this one runs dry. We need ways to keep the environment patched up long enough to bring these new resources online. And, we need more efficient ways to exploit labour (global recessions are good for capitalism, but they do carry the risk of revolution.)

Capitalism is great for the owners of capital, it's not bad for many of the rest of us either (as long as we temper its worst excesses with democracy,) but it isn't a free lunch. In the end, we will have to pay the price for all this wealth.

Some, like the homeless, the people on welfare, and the working poor, already pay that price for us. It is by putting a certain proportion of us in such misery that capitalism ensures the low cost of labour and hence adequate returns on investment for the owners of capital. The suffering of the starving and the homeless in our cities is helping to put the lights on our trees, the iPods in our pockets, and the piles of food on our plates this Christmas.

Is it really so bad if they snatch a can of ravioli from a supermarket shelf in their desperation?

Sea-Walls and Dykes Are Not The Answer

The Australian government is considering measures that would force property owners close to the sea to give up their properties if threatened by coastal erosion or repeated flooding. It is estimated that about 80% of Australians live by the coast. The figure is not so high for other countries but everywhere faces the same problem: global warming is causing sea levels to rise, possibly by as much as 2 to 4 metres in the next fifty years. Coastlines are being eroded and flooded and it will get worse and worse.

Of course, property owners are incensed. There has been a recent 'sea change' rush to the coast and coastal properties have soared in value over the past decade. Owners believe the government should build coastal defences. Failing that, they believe the government should compensate them in full if it pulls them off their land.

Here's what I think. Anyone moving to the coast in the past 10 years must have been off their heads. Anyone investing in coastal properties in the last ten years has made a truckload of money but now the party is over. We've known for a very, very long time that global warming was happening and that sea-level rises were inevitable. If people want to gamble on global warming not happening then that's fine, but it's a gamble they have lost. Tough luck. Maybe next time they'll buy an ostrich farm.

Anyone who has continued to live on the coast despite the sure and certain knowledge that sea levels are going to rise, is also nuts. How many times have they moved house in the past 20 years? How many opportunities have they had to move inland? And now they want the government (i.e. you and me) to build futile sea defences, or to pay them to move elsewhere?

I don't think so.

A compassionate government should provide rehousing assistance to the feeble-minded or gamblers who end up with nothing. As a nation, Australia needs to build more low-rent housing anyway. But no-one forced anyone to buy investment properties near the beach and throw up monstrous high-rises. No-one forced well-off city-dwellers to grab up coastal properties and build million-dollar houses there, turning every seaside town into a yuppie retirement community.

And no-one can force the tax payer to bail all these gamblers and fools out now their 'investment' has turned bad. Surprise, surprise! Climate change is real. Even at the beach you can't bury your head in the sand forever.

Australia is Endangering Global Democracy

Just thought I'd point this out in case any Rudd government ministers are reading.

Even children's groups like Save the Children oppose the Australian government's plans to censor the Internet. Since the government censorship plans are ostensibly to protect children, surely this should give them pause.

Or maybe they would rather just go ahead and put their censorship technologies in place and then come clean about the real reason they're doing this? On the other hand, maybe they wouldn't. Their whole attitude seems to be, "Stuff you, Australia, we're going to censor the Internet and nobody can stop us."

Maybe other Western countries should start agitating against this move. After all, once one Western democracy has taken complete control of the Internet and what its citizens can see there (yes, just like China) won't other Western governments want to do the same? Once there is a precedent, it will be much easier for this to happen in the USA and the UK too.

The scary thing is, no-one seems to understand the danger that government-controlled Internet filtering poses to Australian democracy. Why is there no national and international outcry against this?

Letting Marketers Loose on Language

Language evolves. New words are coined; old words change. The end result is the rich and complex lexicon we have today. Some of this growth and change is acceptable and understandable. New words are needed as new concepts arise, as new social activities develop, and as new objects are made. But some of it arises for less acceptable reasons. Sometimes the person who coins a word - and the people who then use it - are ignorant of a word that already exists with the same meaning. Sometimes new words arise from a misunderstanding of an existing word. (Consider the modern use of the word 'showstopper' which has the opposite connotation of the word in its original meaning.) Sometimes a new word arises from laziness (e.g. when people would rather use 'text' as a verb than say, 'send a text message') sometimes from a desire to draw a strained and unwarranted analogy.

In this last category, consider how the suffix '-gate' has entered the language since 'Watergate'. In Australia in the past few weeks we've had a storm-in-a-teacup political scandal the press has dubbed 'utegate' ('ute' being a local contraction of 'utility vehicle' + '-gate' meaning a political scandal). Also consider the experiments underway at MIT to record and analyse the first three years of a child's life in order to track every utterance the child makes along with every utterance it might have heard. This has been called 'the human speechome project' by (a very strained) analogy with the human genome project. It seems that '-ome' is a new suffix which means something like 'scientific endeavour that produces an extremely large and complete data set in some field'.

It is understandable that scientists would want to associate their work with the human genome project. It isn't quite so easy to see why they would coin a word quite so ugly as 'speechome'. It is interesting to look at how we got to this sorry neologism.

The word 'genome', originally meant the 'sum total of genes in a set,' and was coined (in its German form 'genom') in 1920 by German botanist Hans Winkler. It comes from gen, short for 'gene' + om from 'chromosome.' It was Aglicised to 'genome' in 1930.

Looking back, the word 'chromosome' was coined in 1888, also by a German, anatomist Wilhelm von Waldeyer-Hartz. He constructed it from the Greek words khroma, meaning 'colour' + soma meaning 'body.' ('Colour' because chromosomes contain a substance that stains easily for microscopic viewing.)

A recent addition to this family of words is 'proteome'. This is the set of all proteins that can be expressed by an organism's genes in a particular environment, or under any circumstances (more properly the 'complete proteome'). It derives from prote(in) + (gen)ome and was coined by Marc Wilkins in 1994. Notice that the '-ome' suffix has now taken on a life of its own. It is no longer an abbreviation of 'soma' but of 'genome'. It has stared to become like '-gate', a suffix which emphasises a flattering comparison the user wishes to take advantage of, rather than one that contibutes to the interpretation of the word.

And so we come to 'speechome'. This was probably coined by marketing people at MIT within the last couple of years, simply to aggrandise the project which bears its name. Marketing people, like journalists, use language to sell things. They don't care about etymology - or indeed meaning. They have other rhetorical motives for choosing words than to educate or inform. Now that '-ome' is in the hands of marketers and journalists, expect it to move farther and farther away from the sense in which it was originally conceived.

Thinking It Through Fail

Last Wednesday, the World Health Organisation pushed its pandemic alert status for the recent swine flue outbreak up to 'five' (out of six). As far as the WHO is concerned, then, a pandemic is imminent.

The Australian government (and many others around the world) has its own pandemic plan which is keyed to the WHO alert levels. At 'five' various announcements should be made and actions taken under this plan. One of these is for Australians to stock up on food, water, household supplies, and basic medicines so that each household could last a fortnight without them.

Now this is obviously a recipe for triggering panic buying on a national scale, probably accompanied by punch-ups at checkouts and little old ladies being trampled to death in the rush to buy bags of sugar and other essentials. So the government has said that it won't be instigating this part of its (clearly stupid) plan. Presumably they will wait until the alert level hits 'six' and a pandemic is actually underway before they mention that people should have been stockpiling food so as to avoid the food riots that will then be starting up in all the major cities.

In fact, I suppose, like all governments everywhere, they are quietly hoping it won't come to that, that the pandemic won't happen, and that this is all a storm in a petri dish. Maybe they think that having your head in the sand is the best protection against viruses.

The fact remains, however, that the plan they have is rubbish. If a pandemic hits (and WHO thinks it is imminent) there will be food shortages, there will be shortages of all kinds of commodities. The government's plan for everybody to stock up against such an event is probably quite a good idea. Trouble is, they didn't think it through, did they? With typical stupidity, their thought processes only got so far and then petered out.

If you're going to announce, at alert level five, that every Australian should stock up for a fortnight, then at, oh level two or three, say, you should probably compel all the supermarkets to stock up for the big rush that's coming. That would be reasonable, wouldn't it? After all, in these days of just-in-time buying, the supermarkets and their suppliers are only keeping about three days of supplies. That's why everyone buying a fortnight's worth is such a problem. The supermarkets and even the wholesalers, would be cleaned out instantly with no chance of re-stocking.

Not only would it be impossible for people to buy a fortnight's worth of food, after the first lot had tried, there would be nothing at all for everybody else. It would be a catastrophe.

But how could the government compel the supermarkets to stock up for the level five announcement when the wholesalers don't have that much stock? How could the wholesalers stock up when many of the producers couldn't provide their produce fast enough? (They too are working on a just-in-time basis don't forget.) And then there's the question of compensation. If the government forces the suppliers to over-supply and the retailers to over-stock, what happens if the level five alert never happens?

In fact, whatever dimwit wrote that requirement into the government's pandemic plan (probably an extremely expensive consultant from one of the big consultancies) ought to be sacked. He or she is clearly an idiot.

Must stop now, I've got to get off to the shops before the breakfast cereal is all gone.

Amazon and the Creeps to Whom it Panders

Amazon's recent 'glitch', which de-ranked a whole load of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgener books, along with others of an explicitly sexual nature (including Lady Chatterley's Lover!) was another dismal consequence of the way certain people think - or would prefer not to have to think. Religious and right-wing types don't like sex. Some think their magic god creatures have told them not to like sex (unless sanctioned by a man in a dress who likes abusing small children). Others just have weird hang-ups about it. Some spend their days trying to stop anybody doing sex, seeing sex, or reading about sex. It is for these sad souls that Amazon has an 'adult' field in its book description database - so that it can, if it chooses, hide these books from our view. It is for these same sad souls that the Australian govenment is about to instigate a Web censorship scheme that will give it the power to hide anything it deems 'adult' (or, in fact, just anything it doesn't like) from the entire Australian population.

These weird sex-haters, these creepy people who shudder with distaste at any expression of human sexuality, put a huge amount of effort into pressuring governments and commercial organisations into censoring what we can read. They justify much of their perverted sex-hatred by saying it is to protect children. But they cannot explain why it is necessary to keep children in ignorance of sex. How does ignorance protect anybody from anything? Their intention, they say, is to prevent the 'corruption' of young minds. But what does 'corruption' mean here? Reading a book about gays is not literally going to rot your brain. But it might strike a chord for people who are gay and let them know that other people feel the same way, that not everyone thinks it is disgusting and depraved. This is the 'corruption' the sex-haters are afraid of, that through learning about the experiences of others, people may better understand their own nature. The sex-haters are not trying to protect people - least of all children - they are trying to protect themselves from a world that disgusts and frightens them.

Well, sorry guys, but that's the real world, and it's pretty harmless and mostly benign. You are the creepy, scary misfits, and it is you we all need protection from.

Bertie and the Echidna

Echidnas are cute but, until now, I didn't know just how cute. I saw one near the house once. It must have been young and confused because it was quite small and trying hard to be invisible when Bertie (the dog) trapped it in a corner. (For those who don't live in Australia or New Guinea, an echidna is a monotreme - an egg-laying mammal - which resembles a large, variegated, long-spined hedge-hog, or smallish, short-spined porcupine.)

I suppose Autumn must be a busy time for echidnas because Bertie seems to be finding them everywhere these days and is developing a bit of an obsession with them (although not as bad as the obsession he has with the feral cat he chased up a tree a few days ago!) Today he found the specimen below in our little orchard.


To help you make sense of this picture, this is a full-grown echidna - maybe 30cm long (that's a foot in old money) - desperately trying to bury itself in the ground. The little group of spines on the right is the echidna's tail. It's head is well buried.

It was still digging when I shot this picture - and slowly disappearing. I imagine this is a fairly good defence. It certainly had the dog flummoxed as all the poor little dimwit could get to were spines. It was pretty creepy too. It looked like some kind of evil cactus, pulsating as it slowly sank into the soil, probably digesting the last dog foolish enough to put its snout too close.


And, in honour of Bertie's first birthday (which was two days ago) here's a shot of him looking into our current echidna problem.

More hope than you can shake a stick at

(Cross-posted from my writing blog)

Remember that four-part magazine I told you about - put together by speculative fiction fans and full of stories and artwork donated by Australian writers and artists? Well, the first edition has now been published.

All the money raised by the sale of this magazine will go towards the disaster relief fund for the survivors of the recent catastrophic bush fires in South-Eastern Australia. So get out your credit cards and visit this page to make your donation and get your copy. I've seen the first edition and it is astonishingly good - packed to the rafters with the work of top-notch writers and illustrators. The quality is so high, you'd want to buy it anyway.

To get out a magazine like this in just a couple of weeks is an astonishing achievement. My hat is off to Grant Watson, Ju Landéesse and Maia Bobrowicz, who made it happen - and to all the many Australian spec fic writers and artists who contributed. For the likes of me, giving away a story doesn't cost a great deal - since I don't get paid so much for them - but for some of the big-name contributors, this represents a significant donation. Make sure this generosity isn't in vain, order your copy of Hope #1 now. In fact, why not order all four of them?

Death and Suffering in Australia

At the time of writing, the bush-fires that are still burning in south-eastern Australia have claimed 173 lives, with hundreds more injured and almost a thousand homes burnt down. It is Australia's largest natural disaster ever. Whole towns have been wiped out. Whole families.

Up in the north-east, there are record floods. Some towns have been cut off for weeks. Several people have died, several more are missing. Homes have been wrecked, businesses devastated, crops are standing under water, choked with mud.

I've got no point to make, no axe to grind. I just want to acknowledge this terrible moment of suffering and grief, this horror, literally all around me.

National Australia Bank Behaves Stupidly

I just had an interesting conversation with the National Australia Bank. The NAB is our credit card service provider and has been for many, many years. Yet, while Wifie was in town this morning attempting to pay for a ride-on mower we just had delivered (see picture), the eftpos machine in the mower shop said our card had been cancelled.

She called me and I transferred some cash (we have our other accounts with another bank) so she could pay for it and then I got on the phone to NAB to ask them WTF?

I had the usual fun with the telephone menu system. I sat through many minutes of chatty little adverts and reassurances that my call was very important and they'd get to it real soon now (by which time I was shouting into the phone that they would better demonstrate my importance to them, and they'd get to me so much sooner, if they just put more staff on at their call centre - or words to that effect.) Finally, a very young woman for whom English was clearly a second language, started asking me 'security questions'.

I asked her why she was doing this because I wasn't interested in playing. I just wanted to know why my card had been cancelled. It seemed she wanted to verify my identity so she could set up a phone banking account for me so that I would be able to talk to the credit card department. I told her I wasn't going to do all that. I just wanted to ask someone about my card. She was totally flummoxed by this, so I suggested she put me on to someone who was more senior.

So I went back to the ads and the assurances for several more minutes until a young man came on the line asking me if I was having a good day. I explained that I was not. This was the young foreign woman's supervisor, it turned out, and, although he sounded even younger than she was, he at least spoke good English. He explained again the need to establish my identity so that I could be issued a PIN for telephone banking, so that they could be sure of who I was. I explained again that I didn't want to waste my time doing that and would he just answer the damned question.

It took a while but he finally persuaded me that he was completely incapable of taking any initiative and I'd just have to follow the very stupid procedure. So I said, OK, fire away.

We started off with some easy questions - my date of birth, my middle name, etc. - then he asked for my current account balance. I pulled out the folder that holds my NAB statements (I was sitting in Wifie's office and she has such things beautifully organised) and read out the value at the bottom of the last statement. And the boy said it was wrong.

No, no, you halfwitted monkey, I explained politely. That is precisely the number you sent me. But it isn't the current balance, he complained. I checked the dates on the statement. The statement was for a period ending near the end of November. That's it! I exclaimed. The December statement won't have reached me yet. (A small side explanation ensued concerning my remote location, the unreliability of the mail - often two weeks late - and the fact that Christmas and New Year have happened between the end of the last billing period and today. In fact, it would be a miracle if I had received a statement for December.)

Sorry, he said, I had to give him the latest account balance. But I haven't had it yet, you stupid robot! I remonstrated. Nevertheless, he went on in his best 'customer service' voice, that is the only answer he could accept. So tell me my current balance, I said, and I'll tell it back to you. Sadly, for that, I'd need my telephone banking PIN and we haven't established that you are who you say you are, he explained. So, I said, allowing myself a moment of sarchasm, if I'd stolen this month's statement instead of last month's I'd be OK now. I shouldn't have said it, I know, but it worth it to hear the silence at the other end.

We seemed to be at an impasse and I was just about to ask if there was someone even younger I could speak to when my adversary found a solution. If I were to go to my nearest branch and ask them, they could tell me my account balance. Then I could call him again and we could carry on with our delightful little game. I asked him if they even had a branch where I lived. He looked it up and said they did, in a town 20 km away. I said it would take me at least an hour to drive there, talk to the branch and drive back, just so I could do something I don't even want to do, so he can tell me why the hell his stupid bank had cancelled my credit card. Tough, he replied, as politely as possible.

I was not exactly happy by this point, so I explained to the youngster that if I had to travel 40 km and queue in one of their branches to get some information they already knew just to prove that I am who I am and not someone fraudulently demanding to know why their credit card had been cancelled, I would be closing my account and moving it to another bank. Wouldn't it be so much nicer if he just told me why they had cancelled the frigging card.

For the first time, he stopped sounding so smug and robotic and spoke as if he was a real person. I imagine he was thinking about how these calls might be recorded for 'quality assurance purposes' and how his side of our conversation might seem from a third party's perspective. I mean, it's all well and good doing exactly what you were trained to do but if that ends up with you losing a customer (two if you count my wife) I suspect you haven't actually achieved what you set out to. And, given that so many banks are struggling at the moment... So, probably against all training directives, he told me that the words 'card cancelled' can appear on a shop's machine for 'hundreds' of different reasons - almost none of them meaning that card had in fact been cancelled. Line outages, software errors, and any number of temporary glitches in the system will lead to the same message - 'card cancelled'. Why?For the love of God, why? I cried. Surely that is a completely insane way to design a system? Surely only the most stupid moron who ever lived could conceive of something so utterly crass? Well, he explained, the bank never sends actual account statuses down the lines to shops, so it sends the 'card cancelled' message instead. Nice one, NAB. Way to piss off your customers!

So is my card cancelled or not? I asked. He couldn't say. And there we left it.

I called Wifie after this and asked her to drop in at the branch in town while she was there. She had a similar experience, I gather, but got the anwer that the transaction she was attempting (worth about AUD4,000) would have taken the account a few hundred bucks over the limit. So they sent the 'card cancelled' message, BUT all such messages come with a code number. Shops, it seems, are issued with books that explain what the code numbers mean and the shop assistant should have been able to explain it there and then. Clearly the shop assistant (actually the owner in this case) had not known that he was an integral part of the NAB error-reporting system, or he had somehow failed to understand the esoteric intricacies of the NAB's security procedures. Whatever it was, NAB caused me and my wife a lot of grief, wasted masses of time, and cost themselves about an hour of staff time - all for nothing.

They also lost two customers.

Now, I'm not saying you don't need security on people's credit card accounts but when that security becomes so tight that legitimate account holders can't get a simple question answered, it is a sign that something is very, very wrong. I would prefer to be with a bank that made a little less money because it was a little more open to fraud, and instead treated its customers with a bit more trust and consideration. Even if the security system was a bit more intelligent, it would have helped. After all, in this case, what was at risk? What was the bank saving me from that was worth wasting so much of my time and its time and, ultimately, losing two customers for?

And as for the practice of telling shopkeepers the customer's card has been cancelled for every damned reason under the sun, well, it just creates embarrassment, bad feeling, and a lot of wasted time. It is a really stupid thing to do.

Finally, there is the problem at the root of all this. We exceeded our AUD9,000 card limit by a few hundred bucks. Firstly, I wonder why the limit is so low. Fourteen years ago, when we left the UK, we had a GBP9,000 limit on our credit card and the bank was always clamouring to raise it. That's two-and-a-half times the current limit - and a lot of inflation under the bridge since then. What is wrong with Australian banks that makes them so stingy with their limits? As I say, I've been a customer of this particular bank for about 12 years and have never once failed to make a payment or in any way transgressed their rules. Yet this is how I'm treated when my credit limit is marginally exceeded on a single, large transaction. Well, if I don't even get one chance, if I don't get even the slightest consideration for my long-term custom, then they don't get a second chance either

Sod 'em.

Censored

I wrote to the Minister a little while ago regarding my concerns about the new Internet censorship scheme planned for Australia. His office sent me back a pro-forma PDF document explaining the scheme and the various additional measures (including additional policing and public awareness campaigns) they intend to put in place.

It was interesting and I'd love to share it with you but the communication also included this paragraph:

"The information transmitted is for the use of the intended recipient only and may contain confidential and/or legally privileged material. Any review, re-transmission, disclosure, dissemination or other use of, or taking of any action in reliance upon, this information by persons or entities other than the intended recipient is prohibited and may result in severe penalties."

Since this effectively gags me, I cannot tell you what the government's plans are. Sorry.

I might just say, though, that if the harmless publicity material they sent me had to be suppressed by threats like this, doesn't it speak volumes for the kind of people who are running the country? How can we trust them to build and operate tools that will censor the Internet when they think even their own vague and bland assurances have to be censored?

Australian Labor Party Continues to Disappoint

While I'm moaning on about the Australian Labor Party's support for religious fundamentalist and moral pigmy James Bidgood and how this reflects on the party's ethics, I should also mention the new Internet censorship laws they're about to introduce.

Ostensibly a measure to filter out child pornography, Australia's new net censorship laws will allow the government to manage a blacklist of all the sites it does not want Australians to see and ensure that ISPs block them. The list has not been made public and, as far as I know, never will be. They simply want us to trust them that they're acting in our best interests and 'only' offensive sites will be censored.

Well I don't trust governments to know what is in my best interest (or the best interest of my children) and I certainly don't trust them to censor only offensively pornographic sites. It will only be a matter of time before political sites are on the blacklist (if they are not already). If you give the government the power to control the Internet, you no longer have freedom of information or freedom of speech. If you no longer have freedom of speech, you no longer have democracy. If you don't have democracy, you're stuffed.

The government may even think it is trying to do the right thing with this terrible law but it is not. It is creating the technical and political infrastructure that will allow totalitarian regimes to control our access to information.

This appalling state of affairs is barely mentioned in the media but it is not slipping by unnoticed. A series of protest marches is being organised for 13th November and I urge everyone who can to get out on the streets and let the Australian Labor Party and Kevin Rudd know what we think about this monstrous threat to our freedom.

As for what this says about the moral integrity of the Labor Party, someone calling themselves 'Megaport' writing on the geek site Slashdot put it very nicely. I quote him or her in full:

Just as the USA have lost their moral right to castigate countries who use torture as a tool of statecraft, so too has Australia now given up her right to criticise those authoritarian regimes who would limit the freedom of communication of their citizens.

Given that all the experts (yes, ALL the experts) agree that it won't stop anyone who actually traffics in this despicable content from peddling their filth even for a moment, can anyone here tell me what else we're buying for the price of our moral high ground on this issue?

China will be laughing their socks off at us next time we try to mention the censorship of news and internet in their country - no matter what language our leaders speak the message in.

The point about the ineffectiveness of the measure is actually a good one since there will be many ways for people who actually want child porn to get around it. So you have to ask yourself just why Kevin Rudd wants to go ahead and do this. It can only be that his government would like the general ability to censor material of which it disapproves.